The Energy Market is among the 38 items among 101 Polish journals awarded with Impact Factor. IF for 2009 it amounted to 0.626

The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure created by Philadelphia Institute od Scientific Information reflecting the yearly average number of citations to recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher impact factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones.

Rules for determination of IF. The authors of almost every scientific publication have the habit of referring to their earlier, similar publications in their text. It is the responsibility of each author to do so explicitly - ie to make references to quoted works in the text and to list them - usually at the end of their text. Typically, if a publication is relevant to learning, it is often quoted by the authors of other publications. Hence, the number of citations of a given publication is a good measure of its value. By extending this reasoning to journals, it can be logically assumed that the average number of citations of all the articles that appear in a given journal is a good measure of the prestige and influence of this journal This is the basis of the impact factor. This index is based on the citation index of scientific publications created on a regular basis by the Philadelphia Institute. This index is created by collecting all citations, all of the publications that appeared in the Philadelphia Scientific Journal's selected journals. This index does not cover all magazines of this type worldwide, since the creation of such an index would be a technically unworkable task. The journals indexed by the Philadelphia Institute are selected on the basis of the so- Bradford's Law states that there is a small number of journals in the field (5 to 30), with 99% of all truly relevant publications, and the remaining journals can be regarded as entirely secondary. The list of journals indexed by the Philadelphia Institute covers about 7000 items and this number has not changed much since about 10 years. Every year, some of the journals are removed from the list (when the IF for a particular magazine falls below 0.1) and others are accepted.

IF is determined by the formula:
IF= B/C
B - is the total list of citations that occurred in a given calendar year, of all publications that have been published in a given journal over the past two years, subtracting from that number of autoclaims - that is, citing the author's publications in his publications.
C - is the number of publications that have been published in a given journal over the past two years..

Importance of impact factor. This index, thanks to the authority of the Philadelphia Institute, is of great importance both for the journals and individual authors in this period. For authors, this is a significant factor in deciding which journals to send their publication, and on the other hand, the number of publications published in journals with high IF is a measure of the quality of scientific research described by the author. For academic institutions, a measure of the value of their research is the number of publications accepted for publication in high-IF journals, which were written by employees of those institutions. In many countries there are whole systems of evaluation of scientific institutions and their staff based on the number of publications, including IF journals in which these publications have been published. In Poland, research institutes and higher education departments are assessed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education on the basis of IF criteria. Although the detailed rules for the assessment of scientific units are often modified, however, a consistent overall scheme for this assessment has been developed. The Ministry of Science and Higher Education publishes a list of scientific journals and their associated grades each year. The score of the journal is based solely on the value of its IF in the context of other scientific journals in the field - these points are awarded according to the number of co-authors employed in the unit - additionally points for monographs, academic textbooks etc. The points are summed for a number of the best publications in the past M years by the institute / department and divided by the number of employees. The introduction of the N number (usually double the number of employees) aims to exclude from the academic work of worthless works. In turn, the number M (usually equal to 4) is intended to smooth out natural fluctuations in scientific creativity.